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Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Looks Good To Me - Source Code Review Tools

Code reviews are the rule at Google -- peer review reduces bugs, increases code quality, reduces maintenance cost, opens up team communication, and helps get the job done right the first time.

Like many open source developers, Google engineers used to rely on mail and textual diffs when doing code reviews. That made code reviews a drag. Mondrian, a web based code review tool, made the process much more efficient by presenting the diffs and comments right in our browser. Mondrian inspired the open source project Review Board, and led to Rietveld, and now the new code review tools are available on Google Code's Project Hosting.

Reviewing code in your project is simple: browse any source file or diff, double click on a source line to add comments, then publish your comments along with a general comment and score for the revision.

11 comments:

This doesn't sound so easy... We use perforce for versioning and code collaborator (with a perforce plugin) for code reviews. Code collaborator uploads the files you have checked out and peers can review the changes, add defects, add comments. You can even block submission of code into the depot until a code review has been performed.. I know, you have to pay for both tools...

Sweet, love how it is always on rather than having to create a review. --- blatant bias, I work for Atlassian on Crucible ---Crucible is free for open source if you want it on your own server. Supports CVS, Svn, P4 and in the not too distant future Git & Hg.